I know there is no right or wrong answer, nor a specific number, I am just wondering if anyone has any input on how to decide how many main characters you want your story to have. Example- Last night I had a spark of inspiration and started developing three main/primary characters to go on a journey together in a story I am developing. I thought of their dynamic, relationships with one another, etc. Then this morning I had another spark of inspiration and wanted to add a fourth character in. I am currently developing their personality and dynamic with the other three and think I will cap it at these four. I am just wondering how other writers decide how many main characters is too much.
One trick is to look at two characters and ask "could the roles played by these two be played by one character instead."
Take a look at what kind of arcs these characters have. Are they roughly of equal weight? If someone is avenging a murder, is someone else just trying to save their cake shop from closing? For all four of them to be main characters, they must all be holding up their share of the narrative structure. If not, they might be secondary characters. I struggled with this on a project that had something like 5-9 characters with arcs. While I knew not all of them were going to be front and center, that was still just too many. Too many to write and probably too many to read. I ended up with about three of them being 'main' characters and the others as varying degrees of secondary characters. For you, four might be fine. On the other hand, you might end up having to reduce one or more in importance. It will probably depend. One thing to remember is that even in an ensemble cast, one person is still going to be the 'main' main character. Someone is going to get just a tiny bit more attention than the others, and that's okay. That's a good thing, in fact. Readers need that anchor point.
I have no idea, really, I tend to keep on adding main (point of view) characters well beyond the point of reason. In the two novels I am working on at the moment, the division is as follows: Novely Y 5 core POVs, 3 optional, 1 prologue; meaning 5 POVs strictly necessary for the novel to function as it is intended, 3 that I am considering for POV duty, and one POV that only figures in the prologue. There is surely some redundancy here, I just can't see it. Novel X: Around 9 POVs in total, not all of which are strictly "main characters"; I need 4 at least to portray the, ahem, "good guys", one more for the villain's perspective (perhaps not strictly necessary, but it is the way I have built my novel until now) whereas the rest are up for debate. That's just how I've divvied up things, it should by no means be thought of as a guideline. Heavens no.
Hey there MoonieChild! Welcome to the forums! Your question, while a good one, is a bit too vague. What do you mean by 'main character'? Do you mean focal character--i.e. the character the 'camera' follows at any given time? Do you mean a character that develops throughout the story? You can have lots of those! Do you mean a character who is essential to the story, whether or not they get development? Or do you mean a character who takes up space in the novel? There are a lot of answers for each one of those, and they vary from person to person. @XRD_author gave some great advice, especially if you're looking to tell a story with a particular goal in mind. There are many authors who stick rigidly to "there should be no more characters than necessary to tell the story you want to tell", and there's nothing wrong with that (not that you're doing that, XRD!). Then, there are other authors who just love characters; love creating them, love piecing different personalities and backstories together. Those authors can, if they're not careful, wind up with so many characters that their audience can't keep track. But even if that's the case, there's still nothing wrong with that inherently. There's nothing wrong with creating tons of characters--although it could be argued that there is something wrong with including them all in the same novel! Four characters don't strike me as too many. However, if you were going to try and develop each of them with the same care and to the same depth, I can see the potential for that to get messy. At the end of the day, there really isn't that much room in a novel, and character arcs take a lot of words to be believable. It's my opinion that you might want to choose one character to develop the most--to award the title of Main Character to-- and develop the rest in relation to the first. As an example of the opposite, however, if you don't mind me getting a little off topic, one of my favorite series are the Bakemonogatari light novels. It is, quite literally, a story about character development--everyone but the MC's development. The protagonist goes around helping out people afflicted by ghosts/demons, and although he might get the 'main character' award for his consistency, and the fact that it's his point of view, he is the most underdeveloped character out of all of them. Each of the people he helps gets, essentially, an entire 20k words devoted to them and their growth--what is afflicting them, why it's their fault, and how they overcome it. However, this growth only happens because of their encounter with the main character. He helps them, thus, they get to grow. That's the reverse of what I mentioned above, and it still works really well. Boy, that turned out to be long! I hope there was something in there useful to you!
It depends on what every character adds to the mix. Every character needs to have a reason to be there. If they don't, then they should be gotten rid of.
It also depends on the sweep of the story. Epic stories tend to need epic casts: E.g. Lord of the Rings (and I suspect Game of Thrones,but I don't watch or read violence porn.)
I love a well-populated story. This topic has come up before so you can probably find some other threads on here that could help you out. Four really isn't that many. Think of the books you've read. I bet many of them have more than four main characters. Of course, you can write a novel with less characters, but, personally, I go for more. In my novel there are five main characters and several others with smaller roles, but they're all in there. I do stick to a single POV, but I'm not so sure my POV character is the star of the show. And that was something I did intentionally. I think when you start to write the actual story you'll figure out what's needed and who infect the main characters are. It's kind of hard to figure out just by creating characters. They need a story for you to really know how they will all fit together and their levels of importance.
It occurred to me that in the first book of my WIP, character A is the protagonist (and perhaps the "heroine") of the first 6K words, then she becomes the antagonist and, for the next 20K words, character B (who'd been working with C during the first 5K words) becomes the protagonist, and then after that Character C, the series protagonist, takes over as MC. Character C is present throughout all this, she just doesn't have enough agency to be a protagonist in the first 25K words. That's just how events play out; hopefully readers can handle it. If it's a deal breaker, the book used to start at what is now the 26K mark with Character C as MC, so it could again.
The correct number of characters to have is between too few and too many. I'd go with the minimum number you need as the more characters you have, the greater the chance of the reader mixing up the details and confusing one character for the other. Introducing them one at a time helps. Ultimately, it depends on what you need in order to tell the story. If you want to present four points of view to illustrate four different aspects of your world and so build that world in the mind of the reader, four characters would be a good number to have. If they're all like-minded, they may need different skill-sets or knowledge to fulfill the plot. Conflicts of interest can be a good source of tension so different characters can have different and contradictory goals. In my series of novels, I have one main character as they are written in first person. Some of the other characters are significant as their backstory is included and hopefully, the reader will understand how their aspirations motivate their actions. Other characters play a more superficial role.
Assuming that you're new to this MoonieChild, and this is your first serious attempt at a novel, I'd be wary of laying down an overly ridged structure for yourself this early in the process, especially on your first draft. If you're going the distance with this thing (and I hope you do) you've got at least two more drafts to go. Stressing over if you're doing it "right" at an early stage will only stifle your creativity. Going on what works for me, this is my advice: Play fast and loose with characters at this stage. As you go along, you'll probably see that Character X isn't needed, Character Y doesn't do a whole lot, Character Z can amalgamated with Character A, etc etc. Let it evolve. It all boils down to one question: "Do I need this character in my book?" If the answer is no, then write them out in the second draft. I've got 3 MCs in my book, because without 3, it simply would not work. Their motives are entwined with one another, they're the animating force for each other. Obviously 10 MCs might be a little too much for you and your reader to handle, but you see my point. You will know in your gut if you have too many, so trust what it tells you.
I have four POV characters at the moment. And I want to keep it to about that number so that the viewpoints don’t get too confusing. My goal is to create something that’s fairly simple on the surface but has layers of complexity that someone can really dig down deep into if they want to. There are a lot of characters in the broader cast and many of the most innocuous ones are hiding a lot. One’s an alien. Another is a spy. There’s a traitor too. And the fact that they don’t get a POV makes their secrets harder to find. Yep, Game of thrones has a huge cast. And it’s not porn! It’s HBO™
My one question, akin to what @Infel asked, is 'what do you mean by 'main character?' I would say there is nothing wrong with having four important characters whose storylines we follow. Lots of books have that many, or even more. My concern is this: you say they are going on a journey together. So how are you going to work this journey? I would caution you against having four Point-Of-View characters going on a journey together. The temptation will be to show how the journey's events get seen by each one of them individually. Showing an incident twice (or more times) from different points of view can sound like a great idea, but in actual fact, readers get fed up reading about the same incident multiple times. I think you should be cautious about repeating information the reader already knows, just to depict what each of the characters thinks and feels about it. However, if only one of them is the POV character, or if they each depict different aspects of the journey, then four is workable. If your fourth character makes you enthusiastic, go for it! And welcome to the forum, by the way!
Thank you all for the advice and input you have given! It has definitely encouraged me to think more about the importance of each character and their role in the story. I would be starting the novel with each character's point of view leading up to an event where they all come together by the start of the 5th chapter. However after that, I'd be having the POV focus on one character, who is the anchor point character. The other three have equal importance to the story, but as someone stated above, I want to have that "anchor" character. I should have specified, by main character I meant primary characters/the characters the "camera" follows. Even though it is through one POV, there is a purpose for the 4 primary characters and a story I want to tell through each of them. Regardless, I'll take the advice that I need to be open to the flow getting disrupted and possibly removing a character for x, y, z reason.
